Kohima has a large cemetery for the Allied war dead maintained by the Commonwealth Graves Commission. The cemetery lies on the slopes of Garrison Hill in what was once the Deputy Commissioner's tennis court which was the scene of intense fighting. The epitaph carved on the memorial of the 2nd British Division in the cemetery reads:

When You Go Home, Tell Them of Us And Say,

For Your Tomorrow, We Gave Our Today

These lines have become world-famous as the Kohima poem. The verse is attributed to John Maxwell Edmonds (1875 -1958) and is thought to have been inspired by the epitaph written by Simonides to honour the Greek who fell at the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC.

The British incursions into the Naga territory beginning in the 1840s met with stiff resistance from the independence loving Nagas who had never been conquered by any empire before. The stiffness of the resistance can be gauged by the fact that it took nearly four decades for the British to conquer a territory that is less than 10,000 square kilometers. Kohima was the first seat of modern administration as the Headquarter of Naga Hills District with the appointment of G.H. Damant as Political Officer in 1879. When Nagaland became a full fledged state on 1st December 1963, Kohima was christened as the state capital.